Older Xbox 360 Call of Duty games get online player boosts following a matchmaking fix

The Call of Duty game franchise continues to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, in the game industry. That even includes games that were released over a decade ago. This weekend, gamers who still love to play the Xbox 360 versions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II got an unexpected but pleasant surprise.

Microsoft decided to fix an online matchmaking bug in both of those games. According to the popular CoD Twitter fan account CharlieIntel, (via VGC) the result was a surge of players coming back online to play those games. The post reported that at one point this weekend, over 10,000 players were online at once playing the Xbox 360 version of Black Ops II.

The same account later posted that over 7,000 online gamers were playing the Xbox 360 port of Modern Warfare 3 this weekend.

Those are some impressive player numbers for games that were released in 2011 (for Modern Warfare 3) and 2012 (for Black Ops II). It also goes to show that Microsoft is trying to make its Xbox Live online service work for its older console games that are now only really available as backward-compatible titles for its current Xbox consoles.

It's also ironic that these older Call of Duty games are getting a new life around the time that Microsoft made a new deal with Sony to keep the franchise going on PlayStation consoles for the next 10 years. It's looking like Microsoft's planned purchase of Activision Blizzard may finally go through, which includes the Call of Duty series. Right now, it would appear to be not a question of "if" but "when" the deal will finally close.